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Celebrating An Anniversary By Raising The Bar

This blog marks my one-year anniversary at Dyn, but as many Dyners will tell you, time is actually counted in dog years because of the pace here. (So is this actually my seventh anniversary?)

Quite simply, the past 12 months FLEW by. What started out as managing a “small team of three” quickly became five, then seven, then twelve and ultimately growing as high as 25. The growth in the team was a result of success: a new product launch, a rebrand, a new website, a new office and finally massive ecommerce changes.

Matt Toy (seated second from right) celebrated one year at Dyn with a Mad Men-style photo shoot.

Not only did each of these successes bring more employees but they also came with higher expectations. What I figured out early: when you succeed here, the bar gets raised and it’s not acceptable to just meet expectations the next time. The new expectation is that you’ll keep raising the bar with each successive project.

I understand this isn’t rocket science, but it was the first time I had experienced this first-hand as a professional…and I’m no spring chicken.

Early in my tenure when I realized this was going to be the case, I focused on building a team of people who could help each other continue to do better and better work.

At first, this meant adding individual contributors so we had enough resources to keep up with the increasing workload. Then it meant finding team leads and managers to captain these growing teams.

Some of these folks were at Dyn already, albeit in different departments (I’m quite certain I was viewed as a needy thief by some). Others were brought in from the outside, including from some of the teams I had built at other companies. No matter where they came from, they arrived with the sole focus of being able to do better and better work with each and every new project.

Lo and behold, it worked. Some might say it worked too well.

I’m now off to a new team (Client Services) and my old team (Marketing) is under new, very talented leadership. What excites me is that includes some of the existing team members stepping up in new roles to lead parts of the team themselves. As for my new Client Service friends and I, we’re ready to roll with some aggressive expansion plans and have plenty of new bars to raise.